When we think about the upstream traffic that dominates the internet in most regions, we see a lot of video traffic consisting of packet acknowledgements and bookmarking of progress in watching videos, as well as messaging traffic. In APAC, cloud traffic consumes more than 50% of all upstream traffic volume, and shows no sign of slowing down.
Cloud means a lot of things to a lot of people these days. The cloud is not only cloud application, it is also cloud storage, and even application updates from a vendor cloud. For this specific statistic of >50%, the context that we are defining as cloud is three types of traffic, as shown in the graphic and explanation below:
Cloud Sharing: This can be thought of in this context as file sharing. Technically, peer-to-peer file sharing is a “cloud” application — just the cloud is literally anyone’s computer that is connected to the P2P mesh rather than specific servers in a data center somewhere.
Cloud Updates: We included this category as cloud, because essentially the upstream traffic for this type of traffic is the result of either a system checking with the software update server to see if there is a newer version of an application available, or the acknowledgement during a download (and since Windows Update was in the Top 10 for download, this is statistically significant!).
Note we are not counting social networking as a cloud service, as I view that more as a content service. I also did not include YouTube or TikTok for the same reason.
We are getting close to the release — only a week away, and I think it is time to start revealing some of the rest of the good stuff this week. Stay tuned!
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